


the only place i call home

by featherx



Series: requests [21]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blow Jobs, Hand Jobs, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), “my husband and i live together but he never asked me to be his bf omg are we just friends”
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:22:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24356509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherx/pseuds/featherx
Summary: “They’re staring at me,” Jeritza hisses.A quick glance at the corner confirms that the child from earlier is, indeed, staring at him, with the same unsettling intensity as earlier. “Your turn,” Byleth says, nudging his fork in Jeritza’s direction. “Say hello.”“What? No.”“We all said hello. It’s only fair.”“I am not saying hello,” Jeritza says, voice approaching the level of tetchy that Byleth so loves to hear, if only because teasing him to this point is endlessly entertaining.
Relationships: Jeritza von Hrym/My Unit | Byleth
Series: requests [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1388335
Comments: 27
Kudos: 329





	the only place i call home

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: mbylitza adopting a child from mercedes' orphanage!  
> i've been meaning to write for this ship for a while now but never got the chance, so this was a nice opportunity hehe. thanks for requesting ❤
> 
> title from [heartlines by florence + the machine](https://open.spotify.com/track/7fTqmkB0NuWJfOhZnrJSJg)

Mercedes’ orphanage is a quaint little thing, built in one of the more populated villages in the Faerghus region—a bold move, according to Jeritza, as it made it all the more vulnerable to attacks by those who slithered in the dark. Byleth not-so-fondly remembers all the hours the two of them had spent staked out in front of the then-small building when the Agarthans were still running wild, staring into the shadows in silence until the sunrise chased potential threats away. Mercedes had always told them standing guard outside wasn’t necessary, but she’d invite them for breakfast inside afterwards anyway.

Byleth mulls over those memories now as they approach the orphanage gates, Jeritza swinging the knocker so it clangs loud enough to be heard from inside.

Mercedes herself bustles out after another minute, followed by a veritable throng of children so tiny that Byleth worries, for a moment, that he is going to step on one of them the instant he enters. “Finally! I was beginning to think you two would never show up,” she greets. The war hasn’t dulled her smile in the least. “Come in. I was just boiling the water for tea.”

Jeritza is half a step behind Mercedes at all times, while Byleth takes a little more time to look around them. The orphanage has been remodeled, refurnished, and reorganized plenty in the short time he and Jeritza have been away taking care of things over at Enbarr, and it looks much like a cozy little home now. Floral wallpaper, soft carpets and rugs, cubbyholes and cabinets that are all scaled for small children. It’s definitely one of the nicer orphanages in Faerghus—in Fódlan, really.

And of course, there are… well, the children. Most of them are shouting and screaming at the top of their lungs, but after living with raucous mercenaries and later restless teenagers, Byleth’s long grown used to just about any level of noise. He eyes them a little cautiously, in case any of them think it a good idea to make a grab for the sword hanging off his waist, but fortunately they don’t seem too interested in him.

No, they all look far more intrigued by _Jeritza,_ amusingly enough. “Are you really Mercie’s li’l bro?” one of them asks, voice shrill. Jeritza keeps his gaze firmly fixed ahead of him. “Hey! Did he hear me?”

“Mercie’s li’l bro!”

“Mercie’s li’l bro, look here!”

“Please,” Jeritza grumbles, “make them stop.”

Mercedes goes on smiling as she leads the way to her little table for three in one of the back rooms. “I never make them do anything they don’t want to, Emile. You should speak with them.”

“He hardly even speaks to me,” Byleth says, when Jeritza looks repulsed by the very idea of interacting with children. “I imagine this wouldn’t be much different.”

“I speak to you,” Jeritza protests.

“Asking me to pass the salt or an invitation to spar do not count.”

Jeritza goes predictably quiet afterward.

Mercedes pours them tea—Albinean berry blend, Byleth idly notes. A favorite for the siblings. It’s strange that he still remembers the smallest things, but then he supposes favorite tea blends aren’t small, especially when the war had been going strong. Sitting down for tea had been one of those small pockets of time Byleth had kept on fighting in the war for.

When tea and confectionery have been passed around, they settle around the table and let Mercedes fill the quiet with her voice. Speaking comes easy to her, Byleth discovered early on—maybe it’s because she was once used to Jeritza’s silence, or maybe because she just knows exactly what to do and say around everyone, but whatever it is, Byleth never feels excluded from the conversation despite it being almost entirely one-sided. Sometimes Jeritza just has to sip his tea at a certain angle or blink a certain way and Mercedes will take that as an entire answer complete with a follow-up question.

Byleth is absently stirring his tea when Mercedes perks up, her gaze sliding over to a corner of the room. Byleth follows her line of vision and sees the outline of a child peering out from behind a bookshelf, a long winter coat swamping their tiny frame. “Hello,” Mercedes whispers, waving a tiny greeting.

It takes a moment, but the child hesitantly raises their own hand and imitates Mercedes’ wave down to the little waggle of her fingers. Then their piercing gaze moves on to Byleth.

“Say hello,” Mercedes urges. “This one so rarely approaches visitors.”

“They’re not approaching me, I don’t think,” Byleth slowly says, but the child refuses to look away and frankly their stare is so intense it’s unsettling, so eventually he waves a greeting. The child’s perfectly blank expression doesn’t twitch, but Byleth thinks they may be slightly mollified. “How unnerving…”

“The way they look at you?” Jeritza mutters, giving the child a glance from the corner of his eye. He seems far too engrossed in his peach sorbet to really care. “Now you understand.”

“Eh?”

“Don’t act confused.” Jeritza gives him a bored look. “Everyone you stare at becomes unnerved.”

“It’s true,” Mercedes cheerfully chimes in. “I distinctly remember wondering if you hated everyone around you when we first started in the Officer’s Academy.”

Byleth frowns. “Eh…?” Vaguely he remembers similar comments from people in the past, but he’d always brushed them off; it never seemed like something to be particularly concerned with. Now, though, he supposes learning how to navigate the maze called emotions comes with the realization that he probably came off quite rude to those around him. “Er… I apologize. I didn’t mean to… well, you know.”

“There’s no problem. You reminded me of Emile,” Mercedes says, looking amused. Byleth tries to imagine being similar to Jeritza in any way, shape, or form and comes up blank. “You still do, really, but then that might be because of how much time you two spend together.”

Byleth means to come up with some halfway-intelligent response, but he only gets as far as “Uh” before Jeritza suddenly blanches. “They’re staring at me,” he hisses.

A quick glance at the corner confirms that the child from earlier is, indeed, staring at him, with the same unsettling intensity as earlier. “Your turn,” Byleth says, nudging his fork in Jeritza’s direction. “Say hello.”

“What? No.”

“We all said hello. It’s only fair.”

“I am not saying hello,” Jeritza says, voice approaching the level of tetchy that Byleth so loves to hear, if only because teasing him to this point is endlessly entertaining.

It becomes less entertaining when the child suddenly lets out a hoarse little sound and ducks behind the bookshelf to hide their face. Mercedes frowns and stands up but hesitates, oddly, at the last second, her hand twitching in an echo of the motions her fingers used to automatically arrange themselves in to perform a Heal spell. “Oh dear,” she murmurs to herself. “Hmm. Oh, dear,” she repeats, emphatically.

“Is something wrong?” Byleth asks, giving Jeritza a narrowed glance. Jeritza returns it with his typical deadpan stare.

“Well, this child… I’m afraid I don’t know much about them yet,” Mercedes admits, brow furrowing in concern. “Honestly, they prefer to be left alone most of the time, so I’ve no idea how to act around them. Sometimes approaching makes things worse, after all.”

Byleth turns to look back at Jeritza. “You did this. Do something.”

“ _Me?_ ” Jeritza scoffs, looking very disdainful with his spoonful of sorbet halfway up to his mouth.

“Yes, you. They’re upset because you glared at them.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Jeritza grumbles. But he looks over at the bookshelf anyway, at the faint shadow hiding behind it, and sighs as he pushes his half-finished sorbet over to Mercedes. “Here,” he mutters, looking like he’s performing an indescribable sacrifice.

Mercedes looks pleasantly surprised. “Oh, Emile,” she sighs, but leaves it at that—she hurries over to the bookshelf instead, crouching down and extending the dessert to the child. From here, Byleth can’t see nor hear much of what Mercedes is cooing, but after a while the child crawls back out from behind the shelf, takes the sorbet in tiny hands, and gives Jeritza a shiny-eyed look.

“So you _can_ be sweet when you want to be after all,” Byleth observes, turning his gaze back on Jeritza.

Jeritza looks disgusted, but doesn’t deny it. He leans across the table and snatches Byleth’s sweet buns right off his plate instead.

Byleth doesn’t really know where he stands with Jeritza. Beside him, certainly, but that’s perhaps the only thing he’s sure of.

After the war against the Immaculate One had come the war against the Agarthans. Many of the original members of the Strike Force opted against fighting on the front lines, notably Dorothea, Linhardt, Marianne, a few others Byleth’s forgetting, and of course Mercedes. It was only inevitable that Byleth would end up spending more time with Jeritza, considering their thinned numbers, but over time it had become something less like, “I’m tolerating sitting beside you for this tactics meeting,” and more along the lines of, “You don’t talk and you don’t bother me about useless things so I _guess_ I’ll join you for lunch today.”

And then… they’d sort of ended up seeking each other out of their own will. Why, Byleth certainly can’t say. It isn’t as if they talk much, or at all—most of the time they just sit there in silence, doing things like petting the monastery cats together or cooking together in the kitchen even if they aren’t on duty—actually, even if they don’t _have_ cooking duty like in the monastery anymore, because there were servants in the Imperial Palace to do that, but they’d done it anyway. Their results were less than impressive, admittedly, but that’s not the point.

Now they live together, somewhere on the outskirts of Faerghus, just an hour away from Mercedes’ orphanage by carriage (or three hours on foot, if they’re feeling inclined to exercise). Byleth doesn’t even remember how it had happened. The war had ended, the last Agarthan cut down, Thales in pieces beneath his Seiros Sword and Jeritza’s Scythe of Sariel, and then suddenly Jeritza was pointing at a quaint little cottage and declaring it ideal for the both of them.

Then again, Byleth supposes he can’t really blame Jeritza, because when Jeritza had said that Byleth had just nodded and said, “Okay,” and then a few days later they were paying the deposit and moving some boxes into the house. So.

But Byleth likes it. The inside is as small as the outside, which suits him just fine—the narrow entryway only fits one person at a time, the kitchen and the dining table are in one room, there’s a living room with a single couch, and the bedroom and bathroom are connected. The cottage itself is tucked away at the edge of a village, separated from the rest of the town by several rows of trees and shadowed by a small forest perfect for hunting and fishing on the other side. Hardly anyone from town visits them, and the noise of civilization is faint enough to be drowned out by birdsong.

When they get back home that day, it’s late in the afternoon, approaching early evening; the sun is beginning to set, painting the sky long sweeps of pink and orange. There are some requests shoved in their mailbox, which Jeritza dutifully sorts through (it’s his turn to do the mail today) after feeding the stray cats lounging in their garden by all the catnip they’d impulse-planted when they first settled here.

Edelgard provides them ample financial compensation for their efforts in both wars, of course, but the money there goes to things like paying off the loan for the house and other odds and ends; meanwhile, odd jobs from the townsfolk like these serve as pocket money and a fund for their cat food. It’s mostly heavy work that Jeritza takes care of without even needing Byleth’s help, and every so often there’s a call to catch a thief or find a kidnapper.

Byleth’s not sure what this occupation is called—it’s like being a mercenary, without the killing and the traveling and the stuck-up nobles. All their clients are from the village, and sometimes a visitor or two from the next town over. After a while, the townspeople started greeting them by name on the occasion they dropped by the marketplace, and sometimes asked about how their cats were doing.

“There’s nothing too important,” Jeritza concludes. Byleth looks up from where he’s watering the potted plants by their windowsill, just to show he’s listening. “But an elder in town wants us to make dinner for her.”

“Did she say anything specific?”

“Fish.”

Byleth smiles. “Alright. No problem.” He’s found himself smiling more often ever since his heart had begun beating, and he can’t say he dislikes how it feels on his face. It had started out like an odd facial tic and later became something he associated with fish, cats, and Jeritza.

Jeritza doesn’t smile back, but he nods and draws the chair opposite him out with his foot when Byleth heads over so he can sit down, and that’s pretty close.

They make several servings of grilled herring and some fish and bean soup, enough to last a few more meals after dinner, then head on into the village. By now it’s well and dark out, the moon hung up against the tapestry of the night sky, but the town is still bustling with business and chatter. Lanterns hung up around the village sway in the gentle breeze, casting golden light across one side of Jeritza’s face.

“What?” he says, and Byleth blinks—he hadn’t realized he’d been staring, much less staring openly. Jeritza frowns. “Is there something on my face?”

“No,” Byleth answers, suddenly embarrassed. “I was just… thinking. Never mind it.”

Byleth, and probably Jeritza too, had thought they were just going to drop the food off at the elderly woman’s doorstep and then head back home, but the woman invites them in to eat with her instead. Jeritza is silent, possibly because he’s never been in this sort of situation and doesn’t know the appropriate response for it, so Byleth goes ahead and enters for Jeritza to hesitantly follow after him.

The woman’s home is warm and comfortable, clearly built for only one inhabitant in mind—the three of them have to squeeze to all fit around the dining table. “Thank you very much for all this,” she murmurs. She speaks so softly it’s difficult to hear her over the village noise outside. “I sent that letter on a whim. I didn’t imagine you two would go to the trouble.”

“It’s no trouble,” Byleth says, when, once again, Jeritza is unresponsive. He hasn’t spoken to a stranger in a while, and he hopes his words don’t come out too stilted. “We hope you enjoy. We’re not very good at cooking in general, but fish is… something of a specialty.”

The woman regales them with stories from her youth, mixed with lesser-known legends (to Byleth’s interest) and tales of olden Fódlan (to, unexpectedly, Jeritza’s interest). By the time they’ve cleaned the plates and done the dishes, it’s late enough for the woman to grow slower and sleepier in her movements. “Well, that was very darling of you two,” she says, hobbling them towards the doorway, “but I’m afraid I’ve kept you too long. Hurry on back now.”

“Thank you,” Byleth says, though he’s not sure what he’s thanking her for. It just seems like the acceptable response. Honestly, half the time he really just feels like he’s constantly reading through a handy list of convenient responses in conversation.

She shakes her head. “No, no. Thank you. It gets quite lonely by myself in here. You two are lucky to have each other.”

There’s a strange tone to her voice that Byleth blinks at, but before he can ask about it further, she’s ushering them to the doorstep, giving them both little hugs goodbye, and then closing the door. By now, the village has begun to quiet, lanterns dimming one by one around them until only the moonlight remains.

“Jeritza,” Byleth says, when they’re halfway back to their home, “why did you decide to live with me?”

Jeritza looks faintly surprised at the question, which is something, considering it takes only the most intense of emotions to have any effect on his facial expression. “I asked,” he says, “and you agreed.”

Byleth definitely does not remember being asked to live with him, but then again, maybe just the act of pointing out the house was Jeritza’s own way of asking the question. And anyway, Byleth _had_ agreed—that, he can’t deny. “I—well, yes. But that’s not what I asked. Why _me?_ ”

“Don’t ask questions you know the answer to,” Jeritza says, looking ready to roll his eyes.

“What—but I _don’t_ know the answer. Why do you think I’m asking in the first place?”

Jeritza levels him with a tired look, and it takes another few seconds of silence before he sighs and says, “Because I wanted to. That’s all. Do you need a deeper answer?”

Byleth opens his mouth, then realizes he has no idea what to say. He hadn’t been expecting something as simple as that… even though it isn’t actually quite that simple, thinking about it. It’s a very Jeritza answer, really. But pressing the issue here probably won’t do much, so he mumbles “Alright,” and lets them have the rest of the walk home in silence.

In exchange for only having one bed, it’s a relatively large one that lets the two of them sleep in equally-relative comfort. Their nightly routine is the same as ever—Byleth uses the bathroom first, because Jeritza tends to take longer due to his hair, and Jeritza will be the one to extinguish the bedside lantern after climbing into bed next to Byleth. Tonight, however, Jeritza leaves the lantern on, and Byleth watches as he heads over to their modest bookshelf and retrieves a book to bring to bed.

“Are you really reading that now?” Byleth asks, when Jeritza’s crawled into bed beside him, folding his knees to rest the book against his thighs. “It’s late. Read it tomorrow.”

“There is a certain atmosphere you can only get by reading at night with the bedside lantern.”

Byleth stares at him. “Did Mercedes tell you that?”

“It was Lysithea.” Jeritza looks embarrassed, and it’s adorable on him. “Don’t mind me. Or do you prefer the light off?”

“You know I don’t. This is just like when you were embroidering every night last month.” It had turned out to be a birthday present for Mercedes—Byleth felt rather shabby with his own gift in comparison. “Don’t lose sleep over a book. There’s no deadline for that one.”

Jeritza hums, which is the best answer Byleth’s going to get. Byleth contemplates sleeping first for a while, before shuffling around and leaning against Jeritza’s side instead, propping his chin up on Jeritza’s shoulder to read the book along with him. Jeritza doesn’t move, but he does ask, “And what are you doing now?”

“Reading,” Byleth replies, trying and failing not to sound just a little bit snooty.

A pause, and then: “Don’t lose sleep over a book.”

Almost all of their nights from Jeritza’s embroidery phase had gone like this: Jeritza will stay up until whatever hour of the morning, and Byleth will try his absolute best to stay up with him and watch the careful, cautious movements of his fingers, but he will inevitably end up dozing off first without even realizing it. The same goes for now—after a while, Byleth stops registering the words on the pages and instead focuses on how warm Jeritza is beside him. He closes his eyes for the briefest of moments, and suddenly he’s asleep.

But in the morning, Byleth always wakes up with his head on his pillow, no uncomfortable crick in his neck from falling asleep in an awkward position, and the blanket tucked up to his chin. Today is no different—he cracks his eyes open and catches sight of the book sitting atop the dresser, a pressed flower tucked neatly between the pages. Beside him, Jeritza’s hair is spread out atop his pillow, the longer strands tickling Byleth’s nose, his face missing its usual frown and replaced instead with the serenity of sleep.

If Byleth’s being honest, he’d stay up late every night just to wake up like this—and to this—every following morning, too.

The child is there again when they visit the orphanage next week.

It doesn’t look like they were waiting for Byleth or Jeritza, at least from what Byleth can tell—when he sees them, they’re sitting in the corner by themselves and playing with a stray kitten that must have wandered inside from the garden. Mercedes greets them and tells them to make themselves at home while she sets the table for dinner—saghert and cream, because she has an abundance of ingredients for those, apparently.

“Let me help,” Byleth offers, although it isn’t as much an offer as it is an order.

Mercedes opens her mouth, looking ready to protest, before she shakes her head and laughs. “Oh, Professor. Just like old times, it seems.”

Byleth slants a look over to Jeritza—most of the time he only ever offers when the dinner also involves dessert—but Jeritza looks thoroughly distracted by the kitten that is now staring at him from afar. “Jeritza—”

The kitten meows, and Jeritza is off like a rocket.

Byleth supposes the upside to this is that he doesn’t have to apologize for Jeritza’s behavior like he sometimes needs to in the village—this is Mercedes, after all, his own sister. But he sighs a little anyway and gives Mercedes a tired look when he hears her giggling. “You would think he’s had enough considering all the ones we have at home.”

“No, I don’t think anyone can get enough of cats,” Mercedes says, and Byleth supposes that’s true. The only reason _he’s_ not running off right behind Jeritza is because he’d already offered to help, after all. “And anyway, I don’t mind.”

The cat meows again, and Byleth turns to look as discreetly as he can—Jeritza’s crouched down beside the child and in front of the kitten, petting the cat like he hadn’t done the exact same thing to a horde of the animals just before they’d left. The child watches the both of them curiously for a moment, looking unsure how to react, before they tug on Jeritza’s sleeve and hand over what must be soft food good for the cat; it takes Byleth a second to understand the child’s offering Jeritza to feed it, and they’re making it look like a task only the worthiest are allowed to perform.

“Byleth,” Mercedes gently calls, and Byleth snaps guiltily to attention—he hadn’t realized how distracted he’d been. “Oh, don’t look so worried. I’ve just never seen you look so fond.”

“Fond?” Byleth repeats, frowning. He can’t say he’s ever felt the emotion, but then there are plenty of emotions he’s felt and hadn’t known the names of. Plenty of them he only ever feels around Jeritza, too. “I don’t know about that.”

Mercedes throws him a smile over her shoulder as she heads further in the orphanage, leading Byleth to the kitchen. “You don’t need to answer if this is a bit intrusive,” she says, “but I’ve been wondering about your relationship with Emile for a while.”

“Like… what we are?”

When Mercedes nods, Byleth’s frown deepens and he crosses his arms over his chest. It takes him a while to pick out the words he needs, and by then they’ve already arrived in the kitchen, which smells pleasantly of saghert and cream. “I… don’t really know how to describe it either,” he admits. “It feels like we just became close out of convenience during the war, and when it was all over… er… it’s like neither of us really knew what to do, so we decided to just stick with each other since we got used to it already.”

Quickly, Byleth runs what he’d just said in his head again, a habit he can’t quite seem to get rid of after speaking to the Archbishop during their academy days made him paranoid about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Describing his relationship with Jeritza as just being _used to_ each other definitely feels some kind of wrong, but Byleth can’t tell exactly _what._

“But you live together?” Mercedes asks, shaking Byleth out of his thoughts.

“Yes.”

“And didn’t you say you loved each other?”

“Oh, yes.” Byleth remembers that; it happened in Shambhala, surrounded by Agarthan soldiers on all sides, and suddenly Jeritza had wondered aloud about what he felt for Byleth. How does Mercedes know about that, though? Jeritza only really speaks to her about things he deems important enough. Of course, this includes things like a new dessert he’d tried the other day or a new cat breed he’d discovered in their garden, but the point remains. “Well, at the time, I think it was just the heat of the moment.”

Mercedes pauses in where she’s arranging the dishes and turns around to stare at him. “The heat of the moment,” she repeats, very slowly.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“It never came up again or anything?”

“Um… not that I can recall,” Byleth answers. “Is it that important?”

Mercedes flashes him a smile and reassures him it isn’t, but Byleth can swear he hears her mutter, “Goddess help me,” under her breath when she turns back to the food.

Byleth, and by extension Jeritza, hasn’t stayed over for any meals aside from teatime at the orphanage, so being surrounded by well over a dozen children when he’d grown used to sharing food in relative silence with Jeritza is a little dizzying. The dining table is long, thankfully, and he sits at the very edge so that he only has to squeeze in next to one kid who keeps sneaking her vegetables onto his plate. At the head of the table is Mercedes, and across Byleth is Jeritza, and beside Jeritza is…

“First you wouldn’t even wave hello,” Byleth dryly remarks, as Jeritza and the child from earlier take turns feeding the kitten sitting on the floor between them. “Now look at you.”

Jeritza scoops some more food and dumps it on the child’s plate. “Mind your own business.”

Mercedes’ smile softens. “I’m glad they’ve taken such a liking to each other,” she tells Byleth, when the child and her brother are occupied. “That child… they hardly interact with the other children. You realize I don’t even know their name?”

“Where did they come from?” Byleth asks. He knows Mercedes takes in orphans of all sorts, but considering the state of Fódlan when she had started the orphanage, it makes sense that most of the ones here are either Crestless children born out of wedlock and abandoned by their noble parent, or those whose parents died fighting in the war.

“I’m not too sure on the full story,” Mercedes says, her usual smile fading to make way for a concerned frown. “When I first met them, all they told me was that their parents didn’t want them around anymore, and I didn’t need a better reason to take them in anyway. I’ve never heard them speak again after, and they shy away from prospective parents.”

Byleth hums in acknowledgement, idly watching Jeritza and the child interact—though he supposes ‘interact’ is being generous, considering they haven’t spoken a word to each other. Instead, the child watches Jeritza cut into his food, and then turns to their own plate and copies the movements down to the grip on their knife, and Jeritza lets them steady themselves on the hem of his coat when they clamber down their chair.

“Perhaps they like that Emile is just as quiet as them,” Mercedes muses aloud. “Like how you two get along so well.”

Not for the first time, Byleth wonders just how well they seem to get along to other people. He’s certainly never gotten the same impression. “I’m more surprised they don’t feel threatened by him.”

“Threatened? Emile doesn’t look dangerous, does he?”

Unsure how to explain that Jeritza radiates a threatening energy no matter what he’s doing, Byleth decides to just shrug vaguely and return to his dinner.

The problem arrives when they’re about to leave after dinner—Byleth had been distracted retelling some village gossip to Mercedes and hadn’t noticed until Jeritza had suddenly stopped walking beside him. Byleth blinks and turns around, pointedly not thinking about how he’s grown so accustomed to Jeritza’s constant presence by his side that his absence makes the whole world feel a little colder. “Something wrong?”

“Er,” Jeritza says, and that’s as far as he gets before Byleth is smart enough to look down; the child is clinging to Jeritza’s coat again, their tiny fists wrinkling the fabric Byleth had painstakingly smoothened out this morning. “They won’t let go,” Jeritza whispers, as if the child won’t hear him when they’re literally right next to him.

Mercedes shakes her head and crouches down to be eye-level with the child, whose eyes Byleth can see are beginning to rapidly water. “I’m sorry, darling, but these two have to go now. Be a dear and come back in with me?”

The child makes a tiny, wordless sound and shakes their head furiously—Mercedes opens her mouth to speak again, but the child shies away from her, wrapping themselves up in Jeritza’s coat, but not before Byleth catches sight of their shoulders shaking hard. And yet—and yet, Byleth can’t hear anything else, no sniffling or sobbing. They’re completely noiseless.

It’s that, for some reason, that connects the scattered details Mercedes had told him: how had a child, barely six years old, learned how to keep themselves from making noise when crying?

Before either Mercedes or Jeritza can act—not that Jeritza had looked like he’d been planning on doing anything other than remain frozen in place—Byleth follows Mercedes’ example and bends down close to the ground. Even for a six-year-old, according to Mercedes, the child is almost worryingly small. “Hey,” Byleth attempts, trying not to cringe when his voice comes out far from as reassuring as he’d been aiming for. “It’s alright. Jeritza’s not leaving forever.”

There’s no reaction for a few seconds, and then the child peers out from behind Jeritza’s leg, their eyes big and wet and startling blue. They don’t say anything, but they’re looking at Byleth, and that’s as good a response as Byleth supposes he’ll be getting. “He’ll be back next week to play with you again. So don’t worry.”

“Play?” Jeritza mutters, but doesn’t deny it.

It takes one long moment, but finally the child lets go of Jeritza’s coat and totters unsteadily to Mercedes’ side—she gives Byleth a wide-eyed look and mouths, “Thank you.” Byleth just shrugs—even he’s not sure why he’d done that, and why it had worked.

Jeritza is far less subtle. “How did you do that?” he demands, voice at his normal volume.

“Just… let’s go,” Byleth sighs, ushering Jeritza out of the orphanage gateway before the child can get any second thoughts. He waves bye to Mercedes, who gives him a smile as she guides the child back into the building.

Byleth waits until they’ve piled into a carriage before he speaks. Haltingly, he repeats what Mercedes had told him, and Jeritza listens with unexpected attention. “They must have been abandoned by their parents sometime during the war,” Byleth says, mostly thinking aloud now, “and they, well… might not have wanted to be abandoned again.”

Jeritza is silent, but then he always is, and Byleth’s never particularly needed him to talk for the two of them to communicate. The rest of the carriage ride is spent in companionable quiet.

Unexpectedly enough, it’s Jeritza who breaks the silence around an hour after they arrive back at their cottage. He’s bringing in the laundry they’d left hanging up outside earlier and Byleth is drinking some water when Jeritza, without any warning, asks, “Do you want a child?”

Byleth chokes on his water. Jeritza looks unimpressed and makes zero movement to help him. “ _What?_ ” Byleth eventually gets out.

“You seem to know how to handle children well,” Jeritza says, even though that doesn’t answer Byleth’s question in the least. “And you were a teacher before.”

“Oh, um… barely,” Byleth mumbles. “The students respected me, I suppose, but they never thought of me as much of a teacher. Being close to their age was probably why…”

“Hmm.”

Byleth gives him a narrowed look. “Why? Do you want to adopt or something?”

“No, but I thought you might.”

The idea is intriguing, but not something Byleth had ever thought of. He mulls it over for a little bit before responding. “Ah, well, it’s not really a concern. For now, it’s more important we earn a bit more money first, I think, and finish paying off the loan for this house. This place is hardly fit for a child at the moment anyway.”

Jeritza finishes folding up the last of their clothes. “I suppose that’s true,” he says, blandly, then heads into their room with the pile of garments in his arms.

It takes approximately half an hour Byleth spends doing various household chores—sweeping, washing the dishes, letting a spider out through the window—before the realization crashes into him like a particularly strong tidal wave: hadn’t that conversation been the sort of conversation _married couples_ have?

The concept of him and Jeritza being a couple, much less a _married_ one, is so distressing that Byleth has to sit down by the dining table. By _their_ dining table. In _their_ house. Living together, eating together, _sleeping together—_ all this time, everything they’d been doing for the past several months had been the sort of things _married couples did._ And Byleth had only noticed now!?

He takes a deep breath and does his best to calm down. Surely they’re not _married,_ that much Byleth knows for sure. A marriage ceremony certainly wouldn’t have gone over his head. But… a _couple,_ on the other hand…

Byleth’s startled out of his downward spiral of thoughts when Jeritza’s head pokes out from their bedroom doorway. “Are you coming?”

“What? Oh, uh, yes. In a minute.” Sleeping together, Byleth glumly thinks, is something couples do too.

It started drizzling lightly a few minutes ago, exacerbating the mild chill that’s settled over this part of the Faerghus region all day—Jeritza is already under the covers, eyes fixed on the back of a new book. Probably reading the blurb. “Save that for tomorrow,” Byleth says, mostly on reflex by this point.

“Hmm,” Jeritza says, which isn’t much of a response, as per usual. He opens the book to the first page, but glances up when Byleth hesitates by the doorway. “Is something wrong?”

Of course he’d notice Byleth dawdling. “No, nothing. Just, um…” He shrugs, hoping it isn’t too obvious how he’s desperately groping in the dark for something to follow that up with, and lamely manages, “It’s cold tonight, I guess.”

He regrets saying that as soon as the words leave his mouth, because Jeritza, on what is also almost certainly reflex, only says, “Okay. Get in bed, then.” He even pulls the covers back for Byleth and keeps hold on the edge of the blankets, clearly ready to actually tuck Byleth in when Byleth can see it. Breathing suddenly feels much more difficult than it used to be.

He doesn’t have a choice, though—Byleth can’t run to the bathroom for a shower when he’d taken one less than an hour ago, and there aren’t any leftover chores to finish up outside, so he crawls into bed like it’s his own funeral march. Byleth watches, trying not to look too alarmed, when Jeritza pulls the blankets back over him with such care and gentleness.

This is, of course, offset by the incredibly deadpan look Jeritza has on his face, and the fact that Jeritza is hardly even looking at him when he does this. Then again, that might just mean he’s done this enough times that he doesn’t even have to look anymore, and the thought fills Byleth with an emotion he can’t and doesn’t want to name.

Despite the fairly early hour, burrowing into the bed’s warmth has Byleth drifting off quickly, nodding off against Jeritza’s arm again—this means, however, that he wakes up earlier than usual, too. It’s a few minutes before sunrise, if Byleth’s internal clock can be relied on.

It’s still pleasantly cold outside the blankets, but there’s a comforting heat wrapped around his body that Byleth knows isn’t the covers. Slowly he cracks his eyes open, blinking up at Jeritza’s sleeping face—one of his arms is draped across Byleth’s torso, while his other one is loosely wrapped around his shoulders, having tugged him closer until Byleth’s face is pressed to Jeritza’s chest sometime in the night. This close, Byleth can hear the steady beat of his heart, a rhythm Byleth finds himself sinking into without even realizing it.

Byleth lays in bed a little longer, listening to Jeritza’s breathing, watching the early morning light creep in through the ragged curtain. Whatever they are doesn’t matter, Byleth decides, as long as he can have these mornings for the rest of his life.

Sometimes Jeritza still… regresses, Byleth supposes is the word, into his Death Knight personality.

It tends to come out in the most inconvenient of times: in the middle of helping with lunch, when he has a knife in hand; in the nearby forest while hunting, when he turns his scythe from prey to friend; once during a carriage ride, where he nearly upended the entire thing through sheer strength. Byleth’s inclined to believe the Death Knight is easier to call on if Jeritza’s around a weapon… or anything that can be used as a weapon anyway, if that carriage incident was anything to go by.

Still, even after all this time, Byleth doesn’t know a surefire way to calm Jeritza—or the Death Knight, rather—down and return him to his other personality. Speaking to him rarely worked, and touching him was out of the question; the Death Knight never stayed still long enough for Byleth to get a decent grip on him, and the scythe was always a hair’s breadth away from slicing Byleth’s head off anyway. Half the time, Byleth had no choice but to simply cross blades with the man until Byleth wore him down enough. It was pure luck that Byleth had lasted this long and with these many fights against the Death Knight without being mortally injured.

But… there _had_ been that one time, where all the rules Byleth had decided on—no talking, no touching, definitely fighting—had all disappeared.

It was late in the afternoon or so, and a hot summer day; Byleth was fresh from the shower and was about to call Jeritza over for his turn when he realized something was off. Jeritza only needed to turn around and reveal the perfectly blank expression on his face to tell Byleth what was wrong.

Byleth very vividly remembers panicking. Of course he did. He hadn’t had anything on him except the towel around his waist, and the Death Knight had been standing in front of the bedroom doorway, blocking the only possible escape route in their tiny house. So Byleth had stood frozen, praying the Death Knight wouldn’t go for the pair of scissors on their shared desk near the door, and all the strategy plans he frantically thought up to get out of this situation ended in failure.

But instead of attacking, the Death Knight had just stared at him. He was always expressionless, emotionless—but this time something flickered in his eyes, and his gaze turned so intense Byleth felt hot just standing in front of him. “Jeritza,” Byleth said, very slowly, very softly, even if he knew too well this _wasn’t_ Jeritza.

“That is not my name,” the Death Knight said, stalking closer. Byleth swallowed, made a move to shut himself back in the bathroom and wait this out, but froze when the Death Knight snapped, “No. Stay where you are.”

Fear felt like an old friend, crawling up Byleth’s spine and closing its claws around his neck. He stood still, clutching the bathroom door so hard he worried the wood would splinter under his grip.

The Death Knight stopped right in front of him, so close Byleth could hear him breathe. Wordlessly, the Death Knight raised his arm and touched Byleth’s chin, blunt fingernails dragging across the skin, forceful but not harmful. The touch burned still, but from something different from pain.

Those fingers trailed down to Byleth’s throat, pressing against his collarbone, following the dip in the middle of his chest. It didn’t occur to Byleth just how different this encounter was from all the past ones until he looked up from the hand on his chest and into the smoldering eyes of the Death Knight, and panic returned full-force. This wasn’t Jeritza, but the Death Knight wasn’t attacking, so maybe Jeritza was regaining control, and yet, and yet—

Fingers dug into his skin, the Death Knight’s other hand reaching for the edge of the towel, and that startled a gasp out of Byleth. The Death Knight’s gaze only grew hotter, darker, an emotion so intense it threatened to burn Byleth from the inside out—

—and then he blinked, and he was Jeritza again, staring blankly at Byleth, their faces mere centimeters apart. “Oh,” Jeritza said, very blandly, “excuse me.”

“Ah…?”

“Did I…?” Jeritza frowned. “I didn’t hurt you?” He gave Byleth a once-over that made Byleth want to run back in the bathroom and lock himself there forever as opposed to a few hours, then shrugged. “Forgive me. I am impressed you somehow held… _him_ back without any weapons of your own, though.”

“Ah,” Byleth repeated, head spinning, “it was… I’m fine.” And then, before he could give Jeritza any more cause for concern, he hurried Jeritza into the bathroom, shut the door for him, and practically collapsed in front of their cabinet.

The Death Knight had been close to doing… something. Byleth didn’t know what, exactly, but there had been _intent_ in his eyes, that heated emotion Byleth couldn’t name, and for several fervent seconds Byleth let his mind wander, let it take him to a timeline where the Death Knight had been Jeritza and Jeritza had followed through with whatever that intent had been telling him to do. If Jeritza’s hand had trailed lower, if Jeritza’s hand had pulled off that towel…

That was the one and only time Byleth hadn’t needed to fight off the Death Knight. Until now he doesn’t know what he’d done to make him shift back into Jeritza—if Byleth had done anything at all, really.

He’s broken out of his thoughts when the carriage comes to a stop. Byleth hands over the usual amount of gold while Jeritza holds the door open for him, and they walk the rest of the short way over to the orphanage. These visits are the highlights of Jeritza’s weeks, Byleth knows, and slowly he’s started to let that show more often in his mannerisms—a quicker pace, a restless energy all through the day. It’s kind of cute, really.

Only today, Mercedes doesn’t greet them at the gateway like usual, and the whole place feels quieter somehow—there aren’t any children running around in the gardens, for one. Byleth instantly wishes he had brought along a better weapon than just a knife in his coat pocket, and Jeritza looks like he feels the same. “Something is… off,” he murmurs.

Byleth only nods. It’s not like he can add anything substantial to that. One may think they were being far too paranoid over a bit of silence, but Byleth thinks that’s what the war does to you—silence is the calm before the ambush, and silence is what falls upon a battlefield when blood and bone litter the ground and seep into the soil. He raises his head, slips a hand into his coat, and walks beside Jeritza into the building.

They relax a little as soon as they enter—the children are milling around, playing and napping and snacking and whatever it is small children do. No Kingdom soldiers, or Agarthans, or enemies of any sort, but no Mercedes either.

“Mercie’s li’l bro!” one of the children cry. “And… the other one!”

“The other one?” Byleth repeats.

The young boy points at one of the rooms further in. “Mercie went that way! She’s with some important-lookin’ people!”

“Prospective parents,” Jeritza says, sounding infinitely relieved. Without looking back, he heads towards the room the child pointed out, and Byleth can practically see the tension draining from his shoulders.

The boy pouts. “Didn’t say thank-you.”

“Thank you,” Byleth says, and ruffles his hair for good measure. The child beams and scampers off to join the rest of his friends, and Byleth hurries to follow after Jeritza—he’s already disappeared into the doorway and turned down a corner.

Byleth slows down a little, now that there seems to be no immediate threat—he hasn’t gone in this section before, likely because there had been no real need to, and he quietly observes what Mercedes has done to the place. The places where the children spend time in are filled floor-to-ceiling with furniture and decorations of all sorts, not to mention boxes and boxes of toys, but here the whole place is emptier and much more bland. She must have spent all the funds on making sure the children’s needs would be met… Byleth would hate to see how her bedroom must look like. There’s probably only a mattress in there. Maybe a desk, if she was feeling particularly indulgent…

Down the hallway, something _thump_ s. Byleth freezes, but only for a second—by now he knows every possible sound a body can make, and this one has just been smashed against the wall.

Byleth runs down the corridor, newborn heart rattling in his chest, and skids to a stop in front of an open room at the end of the hall.

It takes him a moment to process exactly what he’s seeing—Mercedes, leaning against a table; an unfamiliar woman, hands clutching her pearl necklace; and Jeritza, his hand clamped around the neck of a middle-aged man, squeezing his throat hard enough that even from the doorway Byleth can see the bulging veins on the back of his palm.

“Jeritza,” Byleth says, but that’s as far as he gets—the Death Knight doesn’t even look at him.

Mercedes steps forward, hand outstretched to brush against the Death Knight’s arm. Every muscle in Byleth’s body screams for him to tear her away from him for her own safety, but the Death Knight doesn’t react to her touch either. Every bit of his attention seems to be concentrated solely on the noble he’s choking to death. “Emile,” Mercedes says, lowly. “Let go of him.”

“Do not interfere, woman,” the Death Knight growls. His grip tightens around the noble’s neck, and a pathetic cough is the only sound the man can make.

“Emile.” Mercedes’ voice softens further until Byleth can barely even hear her. “Please. I’m not hurt. It’s alright.”

It takes another long moment, but eventually the Death Knight’s grip loosens enough for the man to suck in several deep breaths, and then Jeritza lets go of him entirely. The man crumples to the ground, coughing and hacking, and the unfamiliar woman who Byleth assumes is his wife rushes to his side to help him up. Jeritza takes a step back, and then another and another, until his back is pressed to the edge of the table behind him.

“Stay still,” Mercedes says, crouching down by the man’s side as her hands hover over his neck. “Let me help.”

The glow of a Heal spell starts up, but flickers and disappears as quickly as it had come when the man waves her away, letting his wife pull him up to his feet. “So this is how you operate?” he snaps, voice hoarse. “Let some madman roam these halls and attack whoever he pleases? What a pigsty fit for the commoners you are!”

Jeritza’s fists clench around the table, and wood splinters audibly under his grip. Byleth steps forward, regaining feeling in his legs, but only makes it as far as Jeritza’s side before wishing he had just remained standing by the doorway. The murderous aura radiating from Jeritza is thick enough to reach out and strangle another man itself.

Instead of apologizing as Byleth thought she would, Mercedes draws herself up to her full height instead, normally amiable expression hardening into a firm frown. “Please conduct yourselves with dignity,” she returns. “If this is how you act to those you deem belong under you, I cannot imagine how you would treat a child.”

The man looks close to exploding, but his wife rests her hand on his arm. “Let’s just go, alright?” she whispers, giving Mercedes a dirty look. “We only came here because we heard all the praise others were giving it. What a shame your services don’t own up to what other people say.”

She ushers her husband out of the room and down the hall before he can say anything else, though Byleth hears him ranting about tearing the orphanage down by the end of the month. For a while, the three of them are quiet.

Mercedes buries her face in her hands. “I’m so sorry you two had to see that.”

“It’s fine.” Byleth scans her for any visible injuries, but she really is unharmed. “What happened? Why did…”

He can’t quite bring himself to finish that question, looking up at Jeritza instead—but Jeritza is staring at the floor and pointedly avoiding eye contact.

“Well, they—they’re nobles, looking for an heir,” Mercedes begins. “It was a pleasant surprise to know that they were willing to adopt at all. You know how bloodlines are so important for them. But they asked where these children came from, and I explained that they were mostly from the streets and that I didn’t know if they had Crests or anything of the sort.”

“Okay…” There doesn’t seem to have been a problem. “And then?”

“The conversation devolved into an argument about Her Majesty’s regime,” Mercedes says, shaking her head. “I tried to move on from it, but when the man found out I was one of the healers for the Adrestian Empire during the war, he blamed his family’s misfortunes on me. I doubt he was going to actually lay a hand on me, but…”

“But it _looked like it,_ ” Jeritza cuts in, voice hard, and Byleth realizes with a start that Jeritza must have walked in the middle of the argument. “It looked like it, sister. I… Neither of us were about to risk it again.”

The man had been taller, older. Had seeing him shout at Mercedes been enough for the Death Knight to return?

“Emile, I understand. It’s fine.” Mercedes sighs. “People like them are hardly welcome in here anyway. You’d be surprised by the amount of nobles who come in here just to take out their frustrations on me. Is it because they’re too frightened to visit the Imperial Palace and deliver their complaints there, I wonder?”

As always, Byleth’s somewhat surprised by how unforgivingly savage Mercedes can be when she wants to. Jeritza frowns, looking like he’s about to offer to strangle them all, when movement flickers in the corner of Byleth’s eye. He turns around, though he’s fairly sure it’s just a child peeking in to ask about the commotion, only to meet those startling, electric-blue eyes again.

“Oh,” Byleth says, which is all he gets out before the child is dashing away from the doorway. How long had they been standing there? They wouldn’t have run away from Jeritza—these days all they do is run straight _towards_ him as soon as they lay eyes on him.

Jeritza and Mercedes are still talking, so Byleth follows the child down the hallway and into the corner they seem to have claimed as their own. They huddle away, looking ready to slide behind the bookshelf, when Byleth carefully approaches. “Hello,” he greets, stopping a safe distance away from them. “What’s wrong? Are you alright?”

Stupidly, he remembers they don’t talk, something only emphasized when the child just stares at him. This leaves Byleth at a loss for what to do—Jeritza never spoke either, and somehow the two got along just fine with no need for words. They sort of just sat together and pet the cat that usually hung around the kid, and shared whatever food they had on hand.

But the cat’s not here, Byleth doesn’t have food, and the child looks terrified of him again.

He’s half a second away from hightailing it out of the situation and just dragging Jeritza here to take care of it before he realizes the child isn’t looking at him. Instead, they’re staring at something over his shoulder, and Byleth turns around to look.

Standing by the doorway is Jeritza—he must have followed after Byleth when he’d noticed him missing. Byleth could have passed out from relief. “Jeritza,” he sighs, getting to his feet.

Jeritza frowns, looking like he’s about to ask what Byleth did to terrorize the kid as he takes a step forward—but the child flinches away, so violently that their shoulder slams against the bookshelf beside them. Jeritza stops moving so quickly it’s like his limbs locked up. Byleth stares—his first instinct is to check if the child is injured, but although they look physically unharmed, he can’t say they’re perfectly alright with how bad they’re trembling, little hands gripping onto the shelf. They look like a cornered animal, cowering from the predator.

Their parents had abandoned them, Byleth remembers. They shy away from prospective parents. They refuse to speak.

Had the Death Knight’s behavior in Jeritza’s body felt like betrayal?

Byleth doesn’t come closer, but he does try to meet the child’s eyes. They’re wide and frightened, and their legs look tensed to run at a moment’s notice. “It’s alright,” Byleth says, slow and careful. “Don’t be scared. Jeritza won’t hurt you.”

The child meets his eyes for a fraction of a second—but faster than Byleth can react, they’re up and running again, gone before Byleth can even think of giving chase.

Byleth turns back to face Jeritza, now at a complete loss for what to do. Jeritza’s expression looks stricken, almost _hurt,_ and Byleth makes to say something but comes up short. What, exactly, is the appropriate response here? He hadn’t said the right words earlier to keep the child from running. What’s stopping him from making another mistake now?

He almost doesn’t notice when Jeritza’s expression darkens, and he turns on his heel to head back to where Mercedes was.

They leave earlier than usual that day, partly because of the tense atmosphere that refuses to leave and partly because they had gotten a request to drive off some bandits in the nearby area. After bidding Mercedes goodbye—Jeritza gives her a tighter hug than usual—they trudge off towards Magdred Way. The rain starts coming down hard halfway through the trek, which really just makes everything much better.

Jeritza is even quieter than usual, and though Byleth doesn’t feel the need to coax him into speaking, the unbroken silence becomes unnerving after hours on the road and not a single word exchanged between them. Byleth supposes it’s a good thing, that they know each other so well they need not even speak to communicate at times, but Jeritza is only ever this quiet when something is bothering him, and the fact that Byleth can’t do anything about it is the most irksome part of today, he thinks.

He _wants_ to help, but he doesn’t know how. Speaking only ever complicates things. Words got mixed and muddled up, their meanings changing from mouth to ear, and in the end hardly anything got resolved. What was the point of it all? Sometimes Byleth wished he could do away with this nauseating heartbeat in exchange for mastery in communication. It would certainly be more useful than having a constant drumming in his ears.

The bandits are hiding out in a shabby base in the heavily-forested area of Magdred Way. Byleth makes short work of them—they practically _scatter_ at the sight of them—but when it’s barely been ten minutes and they’ve already incapacitated all the bandits, that’s when Byleth knows this can’t be right.

“The request said their numbers were larger than this,” Byleth mumbles, breaking the silence for the first time in hours. “Jeritza?”

Jeritza kicks a groaning bandit into unconsciousness, then shrugs blandly as he slings his scythe over his back. Byleth tries not to sigh, but his instincts are telling him something is off, no matter how little Jeritza cares. “Fine. Stay here and watch them. I’ll check our surroundings.”

The forest is unbearably quiet—it’s the sort of silence that makes Byleth’s ears ring. The rain and fog don’t help, and Byleth has to squint to see more than a few feet in front of him. But finally, above the heavy patter of the rainfall, he hears it: the telltale rattling of a carriage, getting steadily farther away.

He unsheathes his sword. “Jeritza!” Byleth calls, but doesn’t wait for the man to catch up before barreling down the dirt path and emerging from the thick copse of trees to find a carriage. Byleth scowls—even from here he can tell it’s full of smuggled goods, with maybe three or four bandits cramped inside and evidently trying to make a break for it. _What a pain…_ He’d been hoping to get home soon already and dry off with a hot shower—

Byleth’s blood runs cold at a sudden, shrill scream from inside. A hostage? No—the request letter had mentioned them being involved in the slave trade—

Movement blurs in the window of the carriage. A face flashes briefly into view—and Byleth meets terrified bright blue eyes as another scream tears its way out of the child’s throat.

Byleth can barely think, barely breathe, when he gives chase—beside him he just vaguely registers Jeritza’s familiar footfalls and the gleam of his scythe beside him. “They have them,” Byleth manages, in between heaves of his chest; “the child, the—I don’t know why they’re here—”

Jeritza doesn’t respond, but his mouth twists into a snarl and he rockets ahead of Byleth, kicking up mud and rainwater behind him.

There had been a somewhat similar situation in the past—a few criminals slipped past the two of them and tried escaping in a carriage, and Jeritza, in an unfortunately not-so-rare show of recklessness, threw his scythe at the carriage like a spear. It worked—the blade shattered straight through the flimsy wood and lodged itself into the chest of one of the outlaws—but Byleth had almost had a heart attack at the sheer impulsiveness of it all. This time, Jeritza simply charges the carriage straight on and rips one of the wheels off with the curved blade of his scythe. Under better circumstances, Byleth would have stopped to observe, in-depth, the very interesting way the muscles in Jeritza’s biceps work at the action.

As it is, Byleth hurries forward, just in time to parry one of the bandits’ knives before it would have sliced through Jeritza’s neck. Byleth pushes the bandit back, then swings his sword and cuts a deep gash extending from his shoulder to his thigh—the man falls back dead on the bloodied grass.

Yet when Byleth turns back around for the next opponent, he only sees Jeritza, dead bodies strewn around him, staggering back from a dagger protruding from his chest.

Fear strings Byleth’s lungs up, cold and unforgiving.

“J—” Byleth can’t even get the rest of his name out—a thick clot of emotion is lodged in his throat, and all he can do is stumble down to his knees to catch Jeritza before he would have fallen on his back to the ground. “J… Jeritza,” Byleth finally manages. “You… I…”

Jeritza coughs, eyes flicking only momentarily down to the dagger in his chest before looking back up at Byleth, like his injury is something as inconsequential as picking out fruits in the marketplace. “The child…”

“Just wait.” Byleth’s hands are trembling harder than he can remember—Jeritza has survived worse-looking injuries, but none of them had ever been this close to his heart. Swallowing, Byleth positions his hands over the wound and tries, desperately, to call on a Recover spell, but nothing sparks to life—hastily he tries for a Heal spell instead, _anything_ to alleviate the pain until Byleth can get him to a proper healer, but still nothing. Why? His faith magic had been _fine_ during the war, and it should still be fine enough for just one Heal spell, just _one—_

Jeritza’s eyes are fluttering closed, lashes long and light, and for a moment he almost looks like he’s simply asleep, like every morning they share together. Byleth’s chest aches with emotion so heavy it feels like a physical burden weighing down on his ribcage. When was the last time he had seen the other man this injured, this vulnerable? He had always seemed so much taller, so much stronger, and after every battle with the Agarthans it was always him who helped patch Byleth back up, and now Byleth can’t even do the same for him?

The rainfall is a drum beat, syncing in to the thud of his heart. Byleth rests his forehead against Jeritza’s, hands hovering uselessly over his chest.

Something shuffles behind him, and Byleth whirls around, sword at the ready—only to relax when he meets those wide blue eyes, staring at the both of them from the rubble of the carriage. “Hey,” Byleth manages, doing his best to ignore the tremor in his voice. “Hold… Hold on. Wait there, alright? I’ll get you back to Merce—to Mercie in a bit.”

He turns back to Jeritza, blinking rainwater out of his eyes. If he pulls the knife out, he only risks worsening the injury and increasing blood loss, but what else can Byleth do? He can at least try to make a makeshift bandage from some clothes scraps, then hightail it back to the orphanage and ask for Mercedes’ help. But Jeritza has almost half a head over him—can Byleth really carry him that far, and take care of the child at the same time?

There’s a small sound, and the child moves forward unsteadily, their feet dragging against the grass. “Wai—No, don’t,” Byleth stammers, trying to bodily block the dagger and the blood from sight, but the child just keeps walking, grass rustling under their ragged shoes.

They stop in front of Jeritza, on the other side of his body. Their expression barely even twitches at the blood; then, abruptly, they position their hands above the dagger in a perfect imitation of Mercedes.

The bright light of a Heal spell has stars shimmering in Byleth’s vision.

Jeritza’s eyes fly open, but he doesn’t grunt in pain—the child doesn’t react, their hands only glowing brighter until the dagger topples out of the wound, his skin stitching itself back up together. For a moment, all any of them can do is stare at the child, at their Heal spell and how the exact angle of their arms and hands looks straight from a textbook on faith magic.

When the spell fades, the child wobbles dangerously, and Jeritza catches them with one arm. “You,” he starts, and doesn’t get any further than that—the child’s eyes are already closed, their tiny arms clinging tight to his wrist.

“Let’s go home,” Byleth says, after a long while. “We can bring them back to Mercedes tomorrow—it’s raining too hard now.”

Jeritza’s coat is soaked in his blood, so Byleth shrugs off his own to drape over the child before they get rained on any further. This late in the evening and this far out in the wilderness means there’s no chance of them catching a carriage anywhere, so they slog through the mud and muck all the way back home—the cats are crowding beneath the trees in their garden, and Jeritza, predictably, lets them all in the house while Byleth gets the fireplace going. The child is deposited atop the couch for the meantime.

“They must have followed us for some reason,” Jeritza muses aloud, which is rare for him. Byleth hums in acknowledgement, absently fixing something up for dinner. “Then gotten themselves caught up with the bandits… but that faith magic…”

“I’ve never seen Mercedes teach any of them magic,” Byleth says. Something to warm the kid up. Daphnel stew, maybe? They have the ingredients for it. “They must have a talent for it.”

The child wakes up in the middle of preparing dinner, and Byleth quietly observes the two of them from afar—there’s no fear from the child anymore, despite how they must have seen Jeritza slaughtering the bandits from earlier, only curiosity in their gaze as they wander around the living room. Unsurprisingly, not a single word is exchanged between the two, and Jeritza mostly watches them from where he’s sitting by the dining table. At some point the child tries to climb up one of the chairs by the table but their tiny arms can’t reach the seat, and Jeritza has to bend down to boost them up, and by then Byleth has turned back to face the kitchen sink because overwhelmingly warm emotion is squeezing his heart tight enough to hurt.

Once Byleth finishes the stew, he sets out servings for both of them and a little bowl for the garden cats to crowd around, then scribbles out a quick letter to Mercedes for a messenger owl to send tomorrow morning, or whenever the rain isn’t quite so hard. Jeritza watches him boredly, chin propped up on the edge of his palm, pushing the rest of his stew towards a hungrily-staring child. “You won’t have any?”

Byleth shakes his head. The guilt from earlier is still churning in his gut, and he’s fairly sure nothing he eats will stay in. Jeritza frowns, but doesn’t push it.

After dinner they let the child pet each cat once before Jeritza hauls them into the bedroom, forces them into a shower, and lets them pick some oversized sleepwear before they doze off in the bed. “I doubt they’d like being crowded by the both of us,” Jeritza says once he shuts the bedroom door behind him. “You can take the couch. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Are you forgetting you were the one who almost died earlier?” Byleth returns, unable to keep the bite out of his voice. “Just take the couch. I’ll grab a blanket.”

No argument comes—not that Byleth had been waiting for one—so he heads towards the bedroom to get a spare blanket from the cabinet inside before Jeritza suddenly speaks. “Are you… alright?”

Byleth turns around just enough to see Jeritza in his peripheral. “What?”

“You sound strange.”

“That’s…”

“Is it because of a while ago?”

Byleth sighs. “I… Of course it was. I couldn’t help you. You were dying, and… I couldn’t even…”

He knows first aid, of course—you couldn’t be born a mercenary and not know how to treat a wound. And life at the monastery had taught him more faith magic than he thought he’d ever learn. But when he’d needed both of those most, there had been no first aid supplies at hand, and his magic had utterly failed him after months of disuse. It’s nobody’s fault but his own.

Jeritza is silent for a few moments longer, as if waiting for Byleth to continue, but Byleth’s run clean out of words. Then he clears his throat, sounding almost _awkward,_ and says, “Fine. Let’s just share the couch.”

“Wh—I mean, yeah, alright.”

They follow their usual routine, although they have to grab their blankets and clothes from the bedroom as silently as possible and brush their teeth in the kitchen sink. Jeritza’s peeling his rain-soaked clothes off while Byleth curls up on one side of the couch, trying and failing not to stare at his back muscles. “They’re a good kid,” he eventually says.

“Mm,” comes Jeritza’s usual reply.

The quiet that follows is somewhat disconcerting, and after a moment’s consideration, Byleth asks, “Are they… why you asked me if I wanted children?”

“A child,” Jeritza pointedly corrects. “I asked if you wanted a child, singular.”

“Yes, yes,” Byleth says, amused. “But you’re not denying it.”

“Mm,” Jeritza says again, sounding a little more thoughtful than earlier.

“Do _you?_ Want a child, that is.”

There’s a long pause, one Jeritza spends pulling on a loose shirt that exposes far more of his shoulders than Byleth is used to, before he speaks again. “I do not know. It’s strange. Children can be so… fragile.” In a softer voice, he adds, “And I doubt I would make a good father, considering my own.”

Byleth frowns. “Just because your father was… like that doesn’t mean you’ll be the same. If anything, you know better.”

There’s no response, though Jeritza has a contemplative expression on his face. And while Byleth normally isn’t one for talking, and Jeritza’s silence has always complemented his own, for some reason the quiet is unnerving now. “Well,” Byleth manages, “if you do want children—ahem, a child—I wouldn’t, um… mind.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“That’s what I said,” Byleth says, feeling oddly flustered now. They’re having the sort of conversation married couples have again, and now he knows he can’t keep letting this thing go on without establishing something first. “But answer me this first.”

Jeritza turns around to face him fully, but doesn’t say anything. Which is entirely normal of him, so why does Byleth feel so nervous now? Is it because that ridiculous shirt is showing off more skin than Byleth is accustomed to? “U… Us,” Byleth stammers. “The two of us. What are we, exactly?”

“What do you mean?” Jeritza asks, suddenly going still.

“Well—Well, we live together, and eat together, and sleep together, and… and do a number of things together,” Byleth says, feeling very foolish now. “Things people who are just friends don’t do. And now you’re saying you want to care for a child… together. So I… can’t help but… wonder if we aren’t. Just friends, I mean.”

Once again, Jeritza is silent, and Byleth feels his nervousness level shooting up when Jeritza moves to stand in front of where Byleth’s sitting on the couch. With how much he towers over him, Byleth has the impression he’s being trapped right now. “Let me repeat that for you.”

“Y… Yes?”

“This whole time,” Jeritza says, “you… thought… we were ‘just friends.’”

“Y… Yes.”

“Despite living together, eating together—” and this last one Jeritza says like Byleth is truly the least intelligent person he’s ever met, “sleeping together.”

Meekly, Byleth manages, “Yes.”

“…Are you serious?”

“I-I never—I mean, you never _said_ anything—”

“I said I—” Jeritza swallows, leaning forward to grip the back of the couch so hard that Byleth fears the stuffing will pop out of the already-ragged fabric. Then, as if speaking is physically painful, Jeritza mutters, “I told you I _love_ you.”

The words are doing irreparable damage to Byleth’s brain, and he swears his heart went back to being perfectly motionless for a moment. “N… Not in so many words.”

“No, I distinctly remember telling you I love you,” Jeritza says again, and this time the words seem to come easier for him, as if it’s been so obvious and indisputable and undeniable this whole time and alright, maybe it _has_ been, “and you saying you felt the same.” He pauses for a second, uncertainty flickering in his eyes, before murmuring, “Was I… wrong?”

“I-I…” Byleth hardly remembers everything he says in the heat of battle, but he knows for sure that he doesn’t throw sentiments like those out so freely. If he really had said he felt the same, then… well, he must. No—he _knows_ he does.

He knows it because he sees Jeritza doing the most mundane of activities and still feels a little twist in his chest; because even as the Death Knight, Byleth wants to run to him and bring him back down to earth rather than run away from like he used to five, six, seven years ago; because he wakes up in the mornings and stays in bed longer just to soak in the heat of the sunrays and the warmth of Jeritza’s body pressed to his, chasing away the coldness of the evening. Because he waters the flowers in their garden, feeds the cats that gather, cooks dinner for old women, walks around the village, and Byleth does all these together with Jeritza and thinks this is the life he had fought so hard and so long in the war to achieve.

“No, you’re not. You’re not wrong. I… I love you, too.” Byleth tests the words out, lets them fall from his tongue, and nothing has ever sounded so good, so _right._ “I never… knew. I just…”

What else is Byleth meant to say now? Now that he’s spoken the words, it feels like he was born just to live this long and reach this moment in time, where everything else he speaks pales in comparison to telling Jeritza, over and over again, _I love you,_ to make up for all the times he hadn’t.

Jeritza isn’t saying anything else either, only staring at him with emotion Byleth recognizes but can’t name—then he leans closer, closer, until their foreheads are touching again, only this time neither of them are on the verge of death. “May I?” Jeritza asks.

Byleth has no idea what he’s requesting, but frankly right now he’ll say yes to just about anything. So he nods, not quite trusting his voice not to wobble, and his eyes fall shut on reflex when Jeritza presses their lips together.

Kissing is nothing unfamiliar—Byleth knows he’s kissed people before, he’s _sure_ of it, and yet right now whoever those people were fade from memory at the feeling of Jeritza’s mouth on his. At first they do nothing but stay there, Byleth sitting on the couch and Jeritza hovering above him, their heads tilting just so to slide their lips together, soaking in each other’s warmth; when Jeritza pulls back for breath, Byleth can’t do anything more than stare up at him, dazed and already wanting him back.

“Again,” Byleth says, one of his hands coming up to tug at the hem of Jeritza’s shirt, and Jeritza doesn’t need any more prompting to obey, far more force and intent behind the kiss this time; his tongue swipes across Byleth’s lower lip then prods insistently until Byleth lets his mouth fall open for Jeritza to lick at the inside of his cheek. Byleth’s head feels ready to spin right off his neck—he tightens his grip on Jeritza’s shirt, if only to have something to steady himself with, and can’t quite hold back his soft sigh when Jeritza moves even closer, his hand moving to dig fingertips against the dip of Byleth’s waist.

Byleth has to pull back when Jeritza catches his tongue between his teeth—the shock of arousal that zips down his spine grabs him so completely off-guard that he has to scramble back to gather his scattered senses. Jeritza blinks, looking a little lost. “Come up,” Byleth tells him, pulling on his wrist, and he tries not to laugh when he sees Jeritza move onto the couch with more haste than Byleth’s ever seen from him before.

As soon as Jeritza sits down, Byleth swings one of his legs over his thighs and carefully settles above Jeritza’s lap, so that their earlier position is essentially reversed—but now that he’s actually done it, Byleth has no idea what to do now. Kiss, certainly, but he’s sure there’s time for more than just that, when heat is thrumming in Byleth’s veins and screaming for him to do _something._ For a second all he can really do is hold on to Jeritza’s shoulders, running several different scenarios in his head, while Jeritza looks patiently up at him.

“Why do you look troubled?” Jeritza eventually says, reaching up to brush his thumb against the corner of Byleth’s mouth. “If you don’t want to, you only need to say so.” His voice is perfectly neutral, if a bit breathy, but Byleth doesn’t miss the brief disappointment that flashes across his expression.

“No, it’s not that.” Byleth leans in for a swift, chaste kiss that leaves his lips tingling all the same. “I… don’t know where to start. But I do want this.”

Jeritza pulls him back for another soft kiss, this one beneath his jaw, and then another against his collarbone, and more and more around his throat until Byleth is struggling to maintain his composure. With their position, even just a twitch of Jeritza’s thighs has Byleth stifling embarrassing moans behind his hand; evidently Jeritza notices this, because his hands move from gripping Byleth’s waist to sliding up his shirt, warm hands pressing against his back and stomach.

“J—” Byleth whimpers, deciding he’s past the point of caring how humiliating the noises he’s making sound, and _grinds_ against Jeritza’s thigh. It feels like electricity racing throughout his body, and Byleth moans, loud enough that he dearly hopes the child doesn’t hear him from the bedroom.

Jeritza looks dumbstruck. “Do you…” He trails off, and Byleth has no idea what he had meant to follow that up with until Jeritza very tentatively lowers his hands to palm Byleth’s erection through his trousers.

Byleth’s hips jerk forward almost completely involuntarily. “M… More,” he gasps. “You too. You…” And now he sort of understands why Jeritza hadn’t continued earlier, because saying, “You get your dick out too,” is sort of hard to say aloud with a straight face. Instead he shifts forward and ruts against Jeritza’s crotch, drawing groans from both of them—it doesn’t take much else to push Jeritza into undoing the front of his pants while Byleth fumbles to do the same.

The first slick slide of their cocks together has Byleth muffling whatever embarrassing sound he makes into Jeritza’s shoulder—it feels good, too good, and considering Byleth shares a bed with someone else it’s been too long since he’s felt this good before, too. Jeritza’s large hand strokes them both slowly, almost languidly, rubbing the head of Byleth’s cock with his thumb until his fingers are soaked with pre-cum. “Jeritza,” Byleth manages, the syllables slurring together, “m—more—”

Jeritza looks like he’s keeping himself silent through sheer willpower alone, gritting his teeth hard as he moves his hand to rub their cocks together, their pre-cum mixing as it drips messily down his hand. Byleth can barely look, because the sight alone is enough to send him close to the edge already—he gasps and groans and bucks his hips upward, trying to both fuck into Jeritza’s hand and to slide his dick against Jeritza’s for more heated friction.

It doesn’t take much longer for him to come undone—Jeritza leans in to bite a kiss against his throat, thumb pressing against Byleth’s slit, and Byleth is crying out as he comes, making a mess on Jeritza’s shirt.

Byleth has no idea how much time passes between his orgasm and him coming back to his senses, but when he does he realizes that Jeritza hadn’t moved, his cock still noticeably hard, and his eyes are fixed on Byleth’s face. “You’re…” Jeritza swallows, his clean hand coming up to cup one of Byleth’s cheeks. “I love you.”

There the words are again, jabbing into Byleth’s too-human heart. Instead of responding right away, Byleth presses a quick kiss to his mouth, then shifts off Jeritza’s lap to get on his knees before him instead.

“Oh.” Jeritza’s eyes widen. “No, you… don’t have to…”

“I want to,” Byleth interrupts, trying and failing to inject a commanding tone to his voice. He sounds far too fond instead, and now he realizes what expression Mercedes must see on his face all the time. “You are beautiful, you know.”

Jeritza’s cheeks flush darker than Byleth’s ever seen them go. “What?”

“I mean it.” Byleth inches forward, taking Jeritza’s cock in hand first—for a few seconds Byleth watches Jeritza’s face go through a series of different expressions as Byleth strokes him experimentally, but he tires of that soon and licks a short stripe up his throbbing length. Beads of pre-cum drip down the tip almost instantly.

Byleth would love to spend more time taking Jeritza apart, but right now he can tell Jeritza is aching for release—so he takes his cock in his mouth without any more teasing, needing to adjust his jaw to accommodate the unexpected girth. Jeritza groans, his hands flying to Byleth’s hair in a death grip that has Byleth moaning around his cock too. At first all Byleth can do is suck almost fervently, holding on to Jeritza’s knees for support, until Jeritza’s hips jerk upwards, the head of his cock bumping against the back of Byleth’s throat.

He’s _huge,_ Byleth realizes, a little belatedly. Jeritza’s cock all the way inside his mouth has him feeling weak, his gaze half-lidded as he looks up at Jeritza’s face. His eyes are screwed shut, mouth fallen open to let out soft pants and gasps. He pulls his hips back, giving Byleth a moment to rest, then thrusts inside again.

It’s too good, too _good,_ and Byleth’s sure that if he hadn’t just come, he would be growing hard again. As it is, he does his best to follow Jeritza’s erratic pace, his throat tightening up with every deep thrust inside, until Jeritza is moaning and coming into his mouth, thick cum spilling down his throat. Byleth swallows as best as he can, but when he shakily draws away from Jeritza’s cock, excess fluid mixes with the drool trickling down his chin anyway.

For a few moments afterwards, neither of them are capable of doing much else aside from sitting there, Byleth resting his head against Jeritza’s thigh as Jeritza leans back on the couch. Then, after what could’ve been a minute or an hour, Jeritza wordlessly helps Byleth up onto the couch to slump limply beside him.

He kisses a drop of white off Byleth’s chin. “Thank you.”

“Mmh?”

“I am glad.” Jeritza looks away, almost shyly. “That I was not… wrong, I mean. About… you understand.”

Miraculously enough, Byleth does. He sighs as he nuzzles the crook of Jeritza’s shoulder, pushing him down to lie down on the cushions. “Of course,” Byleth murmurs. When they’re both fully horizontal, he kisses him on the lips again, slow and sweet (and tasting a bit like cum, but that’s beside the point). “I love you too.”

They fall asleep in a heap of blankets and pillows on the couch, but Byleth still wakes up to Jeritza’s sleeping face in the morning, so it’s alright, really.

They’d planned to bring the child back to the orphanage by today, but the rain is still coming down hard and carriages are rarely available in bad weather like this, especially in the remote village they live in. Jeritza makes fast breakfast for the clearly-hungry child and the cats from last night clamoring for food, while Byleth attends to the messenger owl that had stopped by sometime during the evening. There’s a response from Mercedes, who’s glad the child is safe and assures she’s fine with waiting until the weather is more agreeable for them to come by.

The newspaper the owl brought along with it tells Byleth that the current storm will last for the rest of the week, though. He sighs and sets the soaked paper aside for recycling later.

After checking their cabinets, Byleth heads out to the village with an umbrella that has seen better days for some supplies that will last them and the horde of cats a few more days. Thankfully, the marketplace is still open despite the rain, and after getting the usual fruits, vegetables, and meat, Byleth asks a middle-aged woman selling poultry what children usually eat.

The woman nearly flies off her seat. “Oh! Why do you ask, dear? Don’t tell me you… you and that lovely man…”

The fish vendor across the street adjusts his glasses. “What whazzat? What’s the matter?”

“Eric, Byleth here just asked me what small children usually eat!”

Just in time, the butcher who regularly sells Byleth wild game emerges from the nearby restroom. “Whoa! Byleth, don’t tell me you and that Jeritza finally… y’know…”

Byleth blinks blankly at the slowly-gathering crowd. “What? I just asked what kids like to eat…”

“But!” The poultry woman flails her arms wildly around. “Have you and your husband taken _that_ step into the relationship at last? Oh! I’m so happy for you, dear!” And she sweeps him up in a hug that has Byleth frantically going over everything he’d said in the past five minutes that led to this.

The butcher heads over to clap Byleth on the shoulder. “Well, what can I say! ‘Bout time you two went around and… y’know!”

“Here, have some a’ these Teutates loach, on the house,” the fish vendor stage-whispers, his grin wide and gap-toothed as he dumps a heavy bag of—Byleth peers inside—the promised Teutates loaches in Byleth’s hands. “Get some tomatoes and make that kid sweet ‘n’ salty whitefish sauté. They get addicted!”

“Please, take an extra—oh, this one was an awful good one, my husband almost didn’t want me to sell it,” the woman says, pressing a fat pound of poultry into Byleth’s arms. “All children love pheasant roast with berry sauce! Why, you and your family can come right over to ours for dinner one day, and I’ll use my special recipe. A warm welcome to your newest addition!” She sounds almost choked-up.

“Hey, hey, don’t forget me.” The butcher crosses over to his stall and retrieves far too many slices of raw meat for Byleth to bring home by himself. “Here ya go. Try feedin’ ‘em some beast meat teppanyaki. If yer kid’s got taste, it’ll be all they’ll want for a week, minimum.”

Byleth has to take a step back before he can speak. “T-This is… Everyone…”

The woman wipes an actual tear from her eye. “We’re just so happy for you, dear,” she coos. “You and your husband look so sweet every time you come visit, and you’re both just so nice and helpful around town. Please, take your child out so we can have a look at them too!”

“Ah…” Byleth swallows, looking down at the veritable mountain of ingredients in his arms. With the rest of what he’d already bought, this is enough to last him and Jeritza over a month with how little both of them tend to eat. “T… Thank you. Very much. I hadn’t realized…”

He keeps the rest of those words to himself, but he thinks the vendors get the message all the same.

Back at home, Byleth finds Jeritza sitting cross-legged on the floor with the child propped up on his knee, both of them surrounded by the garden cats. Apparently they’re both cat magnets, because the child is already cuddling up to one despite having known the animals for less than 24 hours, and of course Jeritza is doing nothing to combat the potential danger of fleas and rabies. Then again, Byleth finds himself similarly disinclined to separate the child and the cat, so he deposits the groceries on the dining table instead.

“I’m home,” he says, softly. The words feel right, too, as right as _I love you_ is. His time as a traveling mercenary meant there had been no constant home for him to return to, and the monastery had been little more than a workplace—and later, a war base—for him. But this cottage, this town, these people…

Jeritza nods, looking up at him. He isn’t smiling, but Byleth doesn’t need him to. “Welcome home.”

He returns to watching the child, which is good, because Byleth can’t do anything but stand there and stare at the scene before him. How had he never realized how much he _loved_ Jeritza before? Honestly, Byleth’s certain he wouldn’t have known it if Jeritza hadn’t said it first, hadn’t said the words that made Byleth’s heart feel ready to stop again.

Byleth can’t say if these feelings had started during or after the war. Had it been when he’d first seen Jeritza as _Jeritza,_ not as the Death Knight who killed and killed and knew nothing else, but as Jeritza who liked ice cream and had unfairly beautiful eyes under that mask all this time? Had it been when they’d first fought side-by-side in one of the battles after those five years of rest, and the way Jeritza had swung his scythe had been strangely mesmerizing? Had it been when the war ended only for another one to come around almost immediately, and Byleth found himself feeling more and more drawn to Jeritza, to fight by and for and with him, to stay by his side outside the orphanage guarding it from Agarthan soldiers because he had grown to value Mercedes as part of his family, too?

Or had his feelings just grown and grown and grown, like the flowers Jeritza lovingly tended whenever Byleth wasn’t looking until their once-barren garden was a blooming mess of colors, bright and beautiful and so full of _love_ that Byleth wanted nothing more than to drown himself in the emotion?

“The rain will last for the rest of the week,” Byleth tells them, though the child clearly isn’t paying attention. “I bought enough food for that time. Well, maybe longer, really.”

“Mm. Thank you.”

For lunch, Byleth tries the teppanyaki. The child’s face is as neutral as ever. For dinner, he goes with the pheasant roast. The child chews slowly, tentatively, then _beams_ for the first time since Byleth’s met them. It’s an odd feeling—cooking has never been one of Byleth’s talents, but it isn’t a weakness of his either—and he thinks he’d like to get used to it.

Living with the child is easier than Byleth, and probably Jeritza, had expected. They get lonely sleeping in a big bed by themselves on the second night, and only let themselves be tucked in once Jeritza and Byleth are on either side of them. On the third night, they pull out one of the books from the shelf and present it to Jeritza, and Byleth has to smother his laughter at the realization that they want a _bedtime story,_ by _Jeritza._ Ironically enough, Byleth drifts off to sleep at around the same time the child does, because Jeritza can surprisingly sound soothing when he wants to.

On the fourth day, Jeritza suggests going out with the kid—some air will do them good, he says, and the rain is more of a drizzle today. So Byleth digs out an old raincoat to tug onto the child, lets them putter around the garden for a while, before they head out into town with the kid trotting along between them. Jeritza, predictably, has to shorten his strides.

The child still clings to Jeritza’s coat and Byleth’s leg half the time, but the other half is spent wandering around in places where there are less people and touching everything they find of note, such as particularly tall trees, mailboxes, and abandoned umbrellas. They jump into every single puddle they find, much to Byleth’s consternation. When they bring them into the marketplace to warm up a little under somewhere with a makeshift roof, all the vendors Byleth and Jeritza frequent coo over the child and subsequently make them shy away under Jeritza’s coat.

On the fifth day, the child performs faith magic again, this time on one of the older cats with a cut on their leg. Byleth panics at first, because any animal can attack when they feel provoked, but this one only lays still and lets the child place their hands above the injury. A Heal spell glows under their fingers for a moment before fading, and the cat is as good as new.

Jeritza hums thoughtfully at the scene. “They must watch my sister often.”

“Mercedes?”

“Mm. It makes me wonder… can they copy _anything_ perfectly?”

Byleth narrows his eyes. “You are not teaching them swordfighting.”

“The lance it is,” Jeritza decides, standing from his seat and already heading towards where they keep their weapons. Byleth curses and charges after him.

The sixth day is when the rain finally comes to a complete stop—the sun comes out from behind the clouds for the first time throughout the whole week, and Byleth brings the child out to look at the rainbow. They stare up at the sky, arms outstretched as if trying to reach for the shimmering colors, lips parted in awe.

“I think it’s time,” Byleth says, when Jeritza comes to a stop beside him in the garden. “We should bring them home. To the orphanage, I mean,” he adds, because Goddess knows it feels like the child’s been part of their home since they’d first met.

Jeritza says nothing, staring down at the child, then moving his gaze up to the sky. Finally he nods—Byleth almost wishes he argued instead.

They take a carriage to the orphanage—the child spends the entire ride staring out the window, which Byleth applauds them for, because the first few times he had ridden in a carriage he had felt sick for hours on end—and the short walk to the gateway entrance has never felt so torturous. Jeritza rings the knocker, Mercedes comes bustling out, and the child is swept up in an embrace they, surprisingly enough, return.

“I was so worried about you when you left,” Mercedes sighs, smoothing their hair and patting their cheeks. “Don’t ever leave without me again, alright? You could’ve been terribly hurt.” Then, standing up to face Jeritza and Byleth; “Thank you, you two. Goodness, it must have been a chore taking care of them for a week…”

“Oh, it… wasn’t, really,” Byleth says, because it really wasn’t, and also because Jeritza doesn’t look like he trusts himself to speak. “We’re glad they’re fine.”

Mercedes smiles, though she looks utterly exhausted. “Would you like to come in for tea? Or stay for dinner! I’ll have to cook up a feast, to celebrate.”

“That’s…”

“No, it’s fine,” Jeritza murmurs. “We’ll be back next time, sister.”

Mercedes blinks. “Is something wrong, Emile?”

Jeritza shakes his head, still not looking at any of them. “We did what we came here to do. Shall we go, Byleth?” It’s a question, but he’s already turning around and walking away, back to the dirt path the carriage they’d taken earlier is surely still nearby.

Byleth casts Mercedes an apologetic look before hurrying after Jeritza. “Don’t be like that,” he says, though it’s half-hearted at best. “We’ll still see them, you know.”

“Until they get adopted.”

“They don’t _want_ to be adopted, I’m fairly sure.”

“But—” Jeritza scowls, looking genuinely upset, and Byleth’s chest twists with a pain he wishes hurt less than the blade of a sword or the tip of an arrow. “Never mind,” he mutters, fists clenched at his sides. “It doesn’t—”

He halts in place, suddenly frozen, and Byleth blinks—but he barely needs to think about why before looking down. Why would he? Jeritza has stopped walking dozens of times within the past week because of the child clinging to his leg, and now is hardly any different. “You,” Jeritza says, looking down at where the child has their arms wrapped around his calf. “Let go. Go home.”

“Home,” someone says, and it takes Byleth a moment to realize it’s the child speaking.

Their voice is… it’s nothing particularly unique, Byleth supposes. It’s high-pitched and wobbly, like any other normal six year old would sound. But it’s _special,_ because it’s this child—no, _their_ child, and those two words alone has Byleth’s heart spinning in circles in his chest.

He thinks of the market vendors, inviting them to dinner and fawning over their child—he thinks of the garden cats, swarming their child for attention—he thinks of the rainbow when the rain had finally cleared, and how their child had looked staring up at it. Their child. _Theirs._

“I can’t,” Jeritza murmurs, crouching down to meet the child’s eyes. “How will I ever be able to give you the life you deserve?”

“Jeritza,” Byleth says, softly, but doesn’t know what else there is to say. How can he convince someone who had killed their father that he would make a good one no matter what?

It’s Mercedes who steps closer, coming to a stop just behind the child. “It looks like they’d rather stay with you, Emile, Byleth,” she says, lips curving into a gentle smile. “I can hardly be surprised at this turn of events. I predicted it from the start, really.”

“Sister.” Jeritza shakes his head. “I of all people—”

“Would be an excellent father.” Mercedes bends down slightly and combs the child’s ruffled hair, then gives Jeritza another one of her smiles. “Children tend to be better judges of people than adults. If you wouldn’t make a good father, why would they want to go home with you and Byleth, then?”

“I…”

“Think about the past week you spent with them.” Mercedes straightens. “Did you enjoy it?”

For a while, there’s only silence. Jeritza stares at the ground, then glances, unexpectedly, to Byleth—and Byleth doesn’t know if he wants him to say anything, but frankly there’s not much to say, so Byleth sends a telepathic apology Mercedes’ way and steps close to press a soft kiss to the corner of Jeritza’s mouth. “I trust you,” Byleth tells him, fingers brushing Jeritza’s chin for the briefest of moments. “I love them, and I love you. But I won’t force you.”

Jeritza pulls him back by the collar for another kiss, one Mercedes politely looks away from, then sighs as he lowers himself back down for the child. They step forward to hold onto the edge of his coat, eyes as bright and blue as the sky after a storm, and says, again, in that small voice of theirs, “Home. I… want to… go home.”

He pulls them into a hug, arms wrapped around their back. “Alright,” Jeritza murmurs, pressing a kiss to the crown of their head. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> [this](https://twitter.com/featherxs/status/1317839188083892224) is how i imagine the kid to look like, though a little older than 6 y/o. why do they have a design now? well... :)
> 
> thank you for reading (❁´◡`❁) if you liked this, check out [this tweet](https://twitter.com/featherxs/status/1239788477807349760)!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/featherxs)   
>  [tumblr](http://featherxs.tumblr.com/)


End file.
